Packing up

I need to pack. I've just read my post from March 27. I was feeling stuck, then. I am stuck no more. I am definitely moving to the farm to work and live in a tent until the RV is renovated (she's back). The moving truck is reserved for June 27th (how's that for symmetry) and my gear has arrived. Honestly speaking, I feel like I'm swimming in molasses. I feel the urge to move, to pack, to do something and yet, this change is so huge that I don't know where to begin. I feel as though I'm going in circles. Which clothes do I take? How much food will I need? How will I store it? Where? Will I be able to load the truck, get it up north, unload it and turn it in to the rental shop in time? Do I need warmer clothes? Where am I doing laundry? I still need medium for the toilet and a gas canister for the stove. And a bike. I didn't worry so much when I was younger. I'm trying to recapture that part of my youth.

Behold the Throne!!!

Pieces do fall into place bit by bit as time goes on. The truck is reserved, storage is reserved, the tent is here and the portable loo and gas stove and water container and sleeping bag and boots and a few other odds and ends. Still, I'm not sure how everything will be set up. What happens when it rains? I do have a tarp for a ground cloth. There is so much to do. I am grading my students' final papers and project at the same time. I think I'll start with the clothing. Get everything out of my room and make final decisions about what goes with me and what goes to charity. So, this post is short and sweet. Heave ho!

Happy Blogaversary!!!

At a performance in February

One year ago today I published a post on this blog for the first time. I believed that it would be an experiment and I anticipated adventure. I am pleased that I have managed to post at least once each month for all but two months. Honestly, though, I'm feeling frustrated.

I feel as though I haven't moved much at all. Then, again, I guess it depends on where I look. I'm still doing the same work and living in the same place but I have successfully transformed how I eat, lost 20 pounds, kept off 16 for six months, and I have made significant progress with my 400 things project. I still intend to celebrate everything.

I am (still?) standing at a crossroads. Which way I go is not entirely up to me. Perhaps that is what feels so uncomfortable about it. Three weeks ago I was fully mentally prepared to move out of New York city, to find relief from the relentless circle I run in trying to keep ends met.

I adore this city. This time last year, the thought of leaving it was unbearable. Three weeks ago I was tired of constant debt and some of the harsher parts of living here (the spit on the sidewalks is really annoying me, for some reason) and I am considering that there are places in this country where one can have a lovely one-bedroom apartment for under $700.00 per month and get fresh oranges for less than $1.00 each.

I have been thinking that I could live on something like $10,000.00 a year and pay off my student loans in five. The loans are currently about $153,000. Paying that off in five years means paying at least $30,600 per year or $2,550 per month. With the loans paid off, I would be free to get on the road and live the nomadic life I have dreamt of for the past year.

I am working on how to achieve this goal. This, actually, is the frustrating part: Realizing that I cannot realize my dream for an untethered life until I have paid off that loan. I wonder, too, why I cannot have the lifestyle I seek while paying off the loans.  I am exploring ways to achieve that, too. A lot can happen in five years.

I do know that paying off these loans is a pre-condition to fully living the lifestyle I seek. When I have overcome the burden of those monthly payments I can take my trailer and Ger and dog and guitar, haul everything with a diesel-powered Chevy truck and travel the country singing my songs and selling my CDs and writing about it.

This dream is an unfolding road with unforeseen twists along the way. And, when I really think about it, frustration is good. It is energizing; it inspires movement. For that I am happy.

Conquering the Late Night Munchies

I have gained four pounds.  I say this with great joy, actually. Since January, which is the last time I worked out, I have only gained four pounds. In the tussle for supremacy between diet and exercise, I must acknowledge that diet has won out every time.

I start working out again next week when the weather will be consistently above 50 degrees (or so we are told - this winter is tenacious!).

I haven't been perfect about eating clean. Those four pounds mainly come from a period when I was cocky and went on a Veggie Ho Fun bender. And then there were the french fries. And potato chips. BUT! As soon as I felt my pants feeling a little tighter, I stopped. That is the break through for me.

Prior to the October Juice Feast, I would have been binging by now, feverishly gaining back the 20 pounds I have lost (so far). Since I have not had any cheese or gluten since October, I also have not had urges to binge. I do still think about cheese but I don't experience that overwhelming primal fury that demands that I must gorge on it. I can leave it alone. So I do.

I still have other habits to transform. Eating late at night and eating potato chips and french fries have been two remaining habits that contribute to weight gain for me. Today I celebrate victory over the late night munchies.

The trick to stopping the late night munchies is really simple. Are you ready for this? Here it is:

Carob Banana Smoothie with Almond Milk

A smoothie or "custard" at around 5pm. Something about having a sweet treat in the late afternoon keeps the late night munchies away.

But that's not all. I have refined the Bento box idea, playing with ingredients and portion sizes and thus I have arrived at a way to eat that works perfectly for me. FINALLY.


Breakfast is two veggies and a protein in tomato sauce with onion and garlic, seasoned with turmeric, sage and cumin and some kind of rice/grain. The two veggies are sweet potato with either spinach, broccoli, or green beans. The proteins are eggs or organic tofu. When I use tofu I add Jamaican Curry Powder. In this photo I have used eggs.











I make enough for two servings so lunch is the other half of breakfast.

Pineapple Banana Custard.
Recipe: 1C frozen Pineapple, 2 fresh, ripe bananas

At around five in the afternoon I have a very sweet delicious banana based smoothie or "custard".  My three favorite flavors are blueberry, pineapple and cocoa (I use carob to avoid caffeine so it really isn't chocolate). When watermelon comes into season I'll probably add a huge bowl of fresh cubes to the rotation. In the summer, I will freeze the bananas and make ice cream.

Gluten Free Mac with Dairy Free Cheese and Peas n' Carrots

For dinner (which I eat around 7pm, at least 2 hours after eating the fruit) I'll either have a gluten free pasta with dairy free cheesy sauce (it is soooo good!) or some form of beans and rice with the cheesy sauce and two veggies: Carrots and peas or beets and peas, or beets and carrots.



I either use a salad plate or the Bento box for portion control.

Jumbo Medjool Date

The final piece is a huge, sweet and gooey date at around 8:30pm and sleep before 11:30pm, which is when the naughty food gremlins really come out.  I don't know why the gremlins come out at 11:30pm specifically, but going to sleep before then is essential.

As I was taking this photo, I noticed where the date originates. Because of my concerns about what is happening in Israel/Palestine (I love my Jewish friends but take issue with the Israeli government) I will likely be switching to figs and prunes from California.






And there you have it. What I eat in a day. For the past two days, anyway. It is about time I figured this out, too, because I have run out of "not from scratch" meals on my sticker chart. The orange smiley faces are days when I only ate from scratch.

400 Things: The Great Slog

For the past six years I have kept a storage unit full of ten years worth of stuff. Honestly, I don't fault myself for keeping the unit or taking so long to deal with it. I did need the time and distance from it. Also, it just seemed an impossible task. Where was I to take it all? 

Avoiding the challenge of dealing with the memories piled up in that little room hasn't been cheap and, more recently, the urge to just get rid of it all has become an obsession. I cannot move on in my happy lifestyle re-design with all this stuff dragging me into stagnation. 

I wished that my problem could be solved as it often is on a reality show where long tasks are presented in fast-forward. Two days of work can flash by in two minutes. Instead, it has been nearly ten months since I began to deal with the storage situation in earnest.

I started off with this mess. The bed was my biggest roadblock. I had to move it every time I tried to get into the unit and nearly killed myself each time. Thankfully, a good friend bought it. Now I was dealing with . . .

this situation, which was still a lot of stuff, a lot more than I felt capable of dealing with. Still, I finally wanted to be free of it more than any benefit I got by ignoring it. And the cost of the unit was killing me. It was significantly over $200.00 per month! I had no choice but to tackle it. This time, however, I did get help from a friend. It was a amazing experience. The two of us were able to get all of this stuff into . . . 

this space in just four hours. And I wasn't even sore afterward. I was in the middle of a juice feast, too, yet never felt too tired to continue.

It felt really good to see the old space empty. It gave me hope of a time when I would no longer have a storage space at all. Of course, the new (much cheaper) "in-between" unit now looked like . . .

This! Still, I felt as though I had achieved something truly significant, not the least of which was saving about $70.00 per month. I made that move in October of 2013.  It took until February of 2014 for me to have the cash to implement the next part of my plan.

Truly I wish that I could just load everything into a truck and take it to a dumpster but I can't. There are too many sensitive documents in that awful heap: I have to go through each and every box, at least glance at each and every document and then decide where everything goes: Shred, Trash, Donate, or Keep.







To keep the "keep" pile manageable, I decided to rent a much smaller unit into which I would place the things I chose to keep. I figured I could afford it since I had already paid for the larger unit and believed I would done sorting everything by the end of February.

This is the Keep Unit. The photograph does not do justice to how much smaller it is than the in-between unit. I saw immediately that I was in for a really tough battle keeping myself to just four hundred things. I might be at four hundred right there.

I got to sorting like a frenzied demon. Based on my pace and the size of the unit, I felt confident that I could finish in eight days total.

Every day I pulled out the boxes I had sorted through the day before in order to get to the un-sorted boxes.

My life took over the hallway. Thankfully, none of my neighbors came to access their units. That would have been a . . . challenge.

The friend who helped me to load in the good back in October is 6'5" tall.  He and his long arms stacked boxes and bags above his head. I am 5'1"at best. So a good friend of mine loaned me this nifty ladder (thank you Elaine and Dave!!!). I got to work bringing boxes down from on high.

I thought the point just behind
the black file storage units was half way.
That's actually half of half way. See the big brown
box on the floor behind the black storage units? Look
for it in the next picture . .  . 

Remember how I said that I figured it would take me eight days? Apparently my memory had significantly faded in the four months between October and February. I got to what I thought was the half way point, moved a bag at the top of the stack and discovered, to my horror, that I had actually only gotten through 1/4th of the unit!

That point behind the big brown box on the floor?
That is half way.

I am realistic enough to know when it is time to re-calibrate. Of course I had chosen the shortest month of the year in which to attempt my goal (and a non-leap year at that). So I have paid for another month with the in-between unit and I will be returning the small keep unit until I am done with this ginormous task. On the upside, my biceps are looking pretty good. 

400 Things in 28 Days from Scratch from Scratch

Ok - I'm back. I could have blogged the 28 days. Then school started and my focus went in that direction. And I made a more basic error.  While I did create a calendar for the month, it looks like this:

I never got the proper stickers! Took that little sticker in the March 1 box from a different project. It fell off. I tried using these as stickers.

They are left over from my moot court days. But they are too big and not very inspirational. Don't get me wrong - the month itself was not so bad. I stayed completely dairy and gluten free. But I ate restaurant food about four times rather than the twice I had challenged myself to do. And I didn't always observe the carb/veggie/protein ratios. It wasn't a disaster but it wasn't a triumph either.

Breakfast:
Oatmeal, Steamed Purple Cabbage, Scrambled Eggs.
We call this "Struggle Breakfast"

Steamed Purple Cabbage with Red Lentil Mash

Scrambled Eggs with Tomato;
Spinach and Mashed Sweet Potatoes 

Scrambled eggs with Corn Phutu; Steamed Purple Cabbage and Carrots
Finally got the ratios right

One lesson I have definitely learned is this: Losing weight really isn't about exercise. Exercise is about physiological health - muscle strength, cardiovascular performance, balance, agility, flexibility. Those kind of things. Weight loss is about nutrition. It is quite possible to lose weight and keep it off without ever breaking a sweat. I am not recommending that; exercise is essential. However (and I say nothing new here), one cannot hope to lose weight by exercising and eating junk.

No amount of exercise can compete with what you eat. I worked out once for ten minutes during January. That's it. Aside from the work of lifting boxes, I really have done no exercise since then and yet I have maintained my weight and still lost inches. What's that about boxes, you might ask?

Remember the 400 things project? I heard Dee Williams, a bright light in the Tiny House Movement, mention that she was inspired to simply her life following some time she spent in Guatemala. She sold her big house, built a tiny house (84 square feet), and reduced her possessions to about 300 things. I was intrigued and I wondered whether I could do something similar.

I have a storage unit full of a lifetime of junk and memories. I have things in for about six years. For many reasons (and I forgive myself for all of them) I have not been able to touch that storage unit . . . until now. The time has come for me to clean out the closet.

In September I moved from the large storage unit . . .

 to a smaller one.

The Much Smaller Unit

I started working on the storage unit around February 10th. The goal was to sort everything into shred, trash, donate and keep piles. I rented a much smaller unit for my keep items.

It just kept on going!

I looked into my medium-sized storage unit and thought, eh. Two weeks. I can do this in two weeks. And I set to work. When I thought myself half way done, I patted myself on the back, took a short break, and then moved a stack of boxes to discover, to my horror, that the unit was actually twice as deep as I had remembered it. I was in serious trouble.








My new plan is to finish by the end of March. I cannot afford to rent two units, so I am returning the smaller unit until I am done with the primary unit.


So, March is the month of the 400 Things in 28 days from Scratch from Scratch, proving that you can always start again.

Twenty-eight Days From Scratch: The Budget

It's time to talk dollars and cents! One of the reasons I hear many people give for preferring fast food over fresh whole food is cost. I cannot for the life of me understand how that can be. I might have mentioned this before but in college I ate quite well on about $20 dollars a week. Being vegetarian helps a lot and, during that time, I did not buy juice, fruit, eggs or cheese, rice or potatoes (I had to carry my groceries for a significant distance; potatoes and rice added more weight than I could justify) and I rarely bought tomatoes, bread or  pasta.

A few times a week I ate at one of the cafeterias on campus. That is when I would have fruit, rice or bread or some of the other foods that I did not purchase from the store. What I bought consisted of the following: One pound of split peas or lentils (I alternated each week), carrots, spinach, cilantro, oatmeal, peanut butter, lactaid milk (I liked the taste), onions, garlic, and a can of cream-of-mushroom soup (I hadn't noticed the MSG).

On Sundays I would combine the peas or lentils with the carrots, spinach, cilantro, onions and garlic and cream-of-mushroom soup to cook up a big pot of soup (but cooked thick, almost like a stew). I would eat a bowl of that for lunch and/or dinner. For breakfast I had oatmeal with peanut butter and milk (that's how my mama used to make it, ok). I also worked out five-days a week and I was in the best health of my life. I had never looked so good.

The Twenty-eight Days from Scratch challenge replicates that diet in many ways. I have a bit more variety built in (fruit, for example). Food costs have gone up - so I do expect to spend more. I'm setting the budget at $50.00/week.

My grocery haul for this week is:

One pound of Brown Jasmine Rice
One pound of Red Daal
One pound of Green Split Peas

.14 pounds of Fresh Ginger

Five pounds of Carrots
One head of Red Cabbage
Threepounds of Frozen Spinach
Two packages of Frozen Squash

Three Apples
Two pounds of Bananas
One bag of Frozen Pineapple

16 oz Egg Whites

The grand total: $33.88. I will eat for a week on what an average restaurant meal costs.

I have $16.12 left. I am running out of peanut butter and honey (I like that in my oatmeal) so I might re-stock on that. I like to get the big jars, though, so I might save some cash from this week and increase next week's budget so that I can get larger jars of each (which is more economical). I might also need to re-stock olive oil, onions and garlic during the week and I'm thinking to get some tofu for protein. There is plenty of room in the budget for that if I don't get the peanut butter and honey. Lets see which wins.

Twenty-eight Days from Scratch Day Two: Feeling Full

Steamed Cabbage and Red Daal Curry (it turns yellow when cooked).

I couldn't finish my lunch yesterday! I posted a picture of yesterday's breakfast in the last post. This is a picture of lunch: Well steamed purple cabbage seasoned with a bit of salt and a teaspoon of olive oil and red daal cooked to thick but soupy consistency and seasoned with red onion, garlic and a yellow curry bullion cube.

I gave myself an out for this meal (it is only two colors) since I had just added the new three colors rule and hadn't yet gone shopping for the veggies I needed.

The Daal was so wonderfully seasoned that about half-way through, I suddenly felt satisfied. I was done.

To this day I am a dutiful child, however, and my mother's command to clean my plate stuck with me. So I valiantly chowed on. Again I got the full signal. So I put the food down for a bit and did something else until it seemed I could eat again. This time, when I felt full, I remembered how folks in Okinawa, which is a Blue Zone, advise only eating until one is 80% full. I put the lid on that puppy and called it over.

One Granny Smith Apple, four carrots, ginger to taste

I have a pineapple banana smoothie on tap for later in the week (the bananas are ripening) so, for something sweet, I decided to make a carrot-apple-ginger juice. That, and the left overs from lunch, was dinner.

Apple Carrot Ginger Juice

Surely, I feared, I would be ravenous by bedtime so I decided to go to bed early and hope that I didn't wake up in the middle of the night gnawing off my arm. Anyway, going to bed a little hungry is also a recommended Blue Zone habit.

I wound up blowing my bedtime (Superbowl). While I felt a bit of tummy growling when I did go to sleep, it wasn't that gnawing hunger that leads to shaking and thoughts of ripping apart the fridge. I slept pretty well.



I felt fine when I woke up in the morning. Again, a little hungry but not ravenous. So i did what has been recommended all my life: I started the morning by drinking a quart (four cups) of warm water. I didn't down it all at once; I drank it over the period of about forty minutes. I'll try this again tonight. I get the sense that, as with the Juice Feast, day three will be the proving ground.